The State of Israel was created in a peaceful and legal process by the United Nations. It was not created out of Palestinian lands, but rather out of the Ottoman Empire, which had been ruled for 400 years by the Turks who lost it when they, fighting alongside Germany, were defeated in World War I. There were no “Palestinian” lands at the time because there were no people claiming to be Palestinians, but rather simply Arabs who lived in the region of Palestine.

It was only after World War I that the present states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were also created – also out of the Turkish Empire by the British and French victors. Jordan was created on about 80 percent of the Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations as part of the Jewish homeland. Since then, Jews have been prohibited from owning property there.

In 1947, a UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 20 percent of the Palestine Mandate: the State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the stateless Arabs. But the rulers of eight Arab states did not want a non-Arab state anywhere in the Middle East. Thus they rejected the UN arrangement and simultaneously launched a three-front war of annihilation against the newly created state of Israel — on the very day of its creation in 1948. Israel begged for peace and offered friendship and cooperation to its neighbors. The Arab dictators rejected this offer and answered it with a war, which they ultimately lost.

A state of war in the Middle East has continued uninterruptedly ever since, because most of the Arab states have refused to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and have refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. To this day, the Arab states and the Palestinians refer to the failure of their effort to destroy Israel as Al-Nakba — The Catastrophe. What for one people was a joyous founding, was seen by the other as a disaster.

Had there been no invasion of Israel by Arab armies whose intent was overtly genocidal, there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.

From 1949 to 1956, Egypt waged war against Israel, launching more than 9,000 attacks from terrorist cells set up in the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip. The 1956 “Sinai campaign” ended Egypt’s terror war, even though U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower forced Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion to return the Sinai to Egypt without a peace treaty.

But the Arab war continued on other fronts. In 1964, Yasser Arafat began a campaign of terror whose avowed goal was the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews. Sponsored first by Kuwait, and later by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, Arafat declared unending war against Israel until all of “Palestine” would be liberated, redeemed in “fire and blood.”

In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel for a second time and were again defeated. It was in repelling these aggressors that Israel came to control the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as the oil-rich Sinai desert. Israel elected not to annex these territories it had captured from the aggressors, but neither did it withdraw its armies or relinquish its control over the region because the Arabs once again refused to make peace.

In 1973 the Arab armies again attacked Israel. This invasion was led by Syria and Egypt, abetted by Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and five other countries that gave military support to the aggressors. Israel again defeated the Arab forces. Afterwards, Egypt — and Egypt alone — agreed to make a formal peace.

In 1987 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) initiated a violent, six-year Intifada (uprising) directed against Israeli soldiers and civilians alike, after false rumors of Israeli atrocities had circulated through Palestinian territories. During the first four years of the uprising, Palestinians carried out more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand grenade attacks, and 600 assaults with guns or explosives. These actions resulted in the deaths of 16 Israeli civilians and 11 Israeli soldiers, in addition to the wounding of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 Israeli soldiers.

In 1993 the Oslo peace process was initiated, based on the pledge that both parties would renounce violence as a means of settling their disputes. But the Palestinians never followed through on this pledge. During the so-called “peace process” — between 1993 and 1999 — they perpetrated more than 4,000 terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis. During this same period, Israel gave the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a self-governing authority, a 40,000-man armed “police force,” and 95 percent of the territory their negotiators demanded. But Israel’s efforts to achieve peace were in vain. In 2000, the Palestinians officially launched a new, second Intifada against Israel, effectively terminating the peace process.

By the same token, when Israeli leaders declared their own independence in 1948, it represented a culmination of their nation-building efforts, not their initiation. More than 650,000 Jews already lived in a vibrant, dynamic, surprisingly cohesive civilization spread through several major cities (including the new metropolis of Tel Aviv, constructed on empty sand dunes in 1909) and scores of agricultural communities built on previously unoccupied land purchased from absentee owners. Intensive Jewish immigration began in the 1880s, more than two generations before independence, and produced distinctive political parties, labor unions, universities, newspapers, theater companies, and even symphony orchestras. This nation in formation also managed to defend itself against murderous Arab riots in 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1939, giving rise to the Haganah (“The Defense” in Hebrew), a militia that averaged 30,000 members over 30 years pre-independence, ultimately developing into the Israel Defense Forces. Like the Minutemen who gave rise to the Continental Army, these citizen soldiers fought a bloody struggle after formal independence, combating formidable foes determined to exterminate their new nation.

Greater care and clarity in describing the history of the conflict will encourage policymakers and the public to grasp its essential contours, and to recognize the absence of any real equivalence in the goals or strategies of the two sides.

Israel, in other words, wasn’t created by the U.N., the U.S. (which observed an arms embargo and provided no aid during the War of Independence), or any other outside agency. The nation grew from the patient, incremental, organic efforts of the Halutzim (pioneers) who risked everything to build a homeland for themselves and their posterity.

Nor did these efforts in any way “uproot” or “displace” Palestinian society. During the years of intensive immigration between World War I and World War II, the Jewish population west of the Jordan increased by 470,000 while the non-Jewish population swelled by 588,000. According to respected British census figures, the number of Palestinian Arabs exploded on the eve of Israeli independence, increasing 120 percent between 1922 and 1947. These figures prove that the rise of the Jewish state (with its greatly heightened economic development) drew more Palestinians into the area, rather than driving them away.

Palestinians became refugees only after fighting began in the War of Independence, especially after five Arab states with well-equipped armies invaded the fledgling Jewish state, pledged to achieve its total annihilation. Even then, in the midst of massive bloodshed and widespread violence, the Palestinian Arab population increased, rather than declining. In 1941, before Israeli independence and the claimed “uprooting” of Palestinians, 1,111,398 Arabs lived in what later became Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Nine years later, after the turmoil of war and dislocation, that number had risen (slightly) to 1,162,100. By 1980 (with Israel controlling all territory west of the Jordan), the Palestinian numbers had nearly doubled, and they more than doubled again by 2005. Most recent figures show that the Palestinian population of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank has increased by more than fivefold since independence and the flight of the famous refugees—hardly evidence of some ruthless program of ethnic cleansing.

Unfortunately, anti-Israel propagandists choose to ignore these facts and to distort history with misleading and manipulative language. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently wrote in The New York Times about the 1947 U.N. vote to partition the British Mandate into two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian. “Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948,” he notes, “the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.”

He neglects to mention that the Palestinian leaders themselves (led by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, a close Hitler ally during the war) rejected the U.N. partition and made no effort to set up a Palestinian state, either before or after the War of Independence. Between 1949 and 1967, Arabs (the Egyptians and Jordanians) controlled every inch of territory that Abbas now seeks for his new state—all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. They could have established a Palestinian homeland at any point during those 18 years and, incidentally, continued denying Jews any access to their holy sites. With scant protest from Palestinians, the Arab states made no effort to “fulfill the promise” because they concentrated all their attention and effort on destroying Israel rather than building Palestine. They cared far more about expelling Jews than they did about re-settling Palestinians.

Go read the rest, and spread it around. stop the lies about Israel and “Palestine”. The fact is that Palestinians want to destroy Israel far more than they want peace with Da JOOOOS!